The Plagiarism Checker

I just found a helpful free site called The Plagiarism Checker which claims to detect whether a piece of text is plagiarized or not. I took several chunks from readings assigned to my class, reworded them a little, and ran them through the analyzer, and it worked fine: it detected “potential plagiarism,” and then linked me to Google search results that referenced the readings I had reworked. The Internet has not only made a vast array of research resources available to many students, it has also made it easier to make what Bakhtin would have called “others’ words your own” (especially without citing them). While a Google search is a rule of thumb nowadays for many professors and teachers, more comprehensive academic plagiarism detection softwares tend to be expensive, affordable generally only at the institutional level. For UC Berkeley students and teachers, here’s a plagiarism run down from the library.

Check out the free anti-plagiarism site, and let me know what you think!